Medics during the Great Patriotic War showed no less heroism, steadfastness and courage than soldiers, sailors, pilots, rear workers and officers. The nurses on fragile shoulders carried the wounded soldiers, the medical staff of the hospitals worked for days without leaving the sick, the pharmacists did everything possible to provide the front with highly effective medicines in the required volumes. There was no easy post, position, place of work - each of the doctors contributed.
Start of war
The medical service, like the entire army, entered the war in the conditions of its sudden start. Many activities aimed at improving medical provision and supplies were still largely unfinished. The divisions of the border districts entered the fighting with a limited supply of medicines, tools and equipment. The more significant is the feat of doctors during the Great Patriotic War, who managed to save the he alth and lives of soldiers and civilians in the most difficult conditions.
From the first day of the war, a tense situation has been created both with the supply of active troops and with the production of medical equipment by industry. The main stocks of medications, surgical instruments, dressings, concentrated in the border districts, did not manage to be taken out. Significant amounts of medical equipment were lost, which were intended for the formed and deployed units and institutions.
Despite the loss of sanitary warehouses, thanks to the heroic work and incredible efforts of military pharmacists, more than 1,200 wagons of medical equipment were taken to the rear of the country from the surviving warehouses of the front line.
Blood Experience
The hardest year for the country in 1941 ended with the long-awaited first big victory of the Red Army in the exhausting battle near Moscow. Here, the feat of doctors during the Great Patriotic War was especially clearly manifested. Photos of that period captured footage of fighters rescued from hurricane fire and bombing by orderlies and nurses. Often there were cases when medical workers covered the wounded with themselves, not sparing their lives. Unbiased statistics speak about the intensity of the work of the medical service. During the battle of Moscow, a huge amount ofmedical supplies:
- Only on the Western Front over 12 million meters of gauze.
- Kalinin and Western fronts used up more than 172 tons of gypsum.
- Widely used kits "help the wounded", regimental and divisional, which contained the most important medicines, serums, suture materials, syringes. From the front-line warehouses of the Western Front, 583 regimental sets and 169 divisional sets were issued to the troops.
Methods for organizing medical supplies in the Moscow battle, summarized at a meeting in the GVSU of the Red Army on April 12-15, 1942, made it possible to more successfully provide troops and medical institutions in subsequent operations of the war.
Moscow is behind us
Medics during the Great Patriotic War learned to work effectively both in defense (retreat), and on the offensive, and during rapid breakthroughs to a great depth of the front. In many ways, valuable experience was gained during a long-term staunch defense and subsequent counter-offensive in the Moscow direction. The battle near Moscow made it possible to adjust the organization of medical support for troops in the transition from defensive operations to an offensive operation of a strategic scale.
Even before the start of the defensive battle near the capital, the medical service of the Western and Bryansk fronts did a great job of putting their forces and equipment in order, which were significantly weakened as a result of heavy losses in the first two months of the outbreak of the war. Especially great attention had to be paid to staffing the medical units of regiments and divisions with orderlies and porters.
On the frontline
There are numerous facts about doctors during the Great Patriotic War who did not spare their own lives in order to endure, drag out, by any means deliver the wounded from the battlefield to the hospital. I had to work under fire, in heat and rain, in mud and snow.
Especially difficult was the removal of the wounded in deep snow. Therefore, the most reliable ambulance vehicle, especially during snowstorms and snow drifts, turned out to be sleds. And not only for transporting the wounded to regimental first-aid posts (PMP), but often for their evacuation from PMP to divisional first-aid posts. The need to have appropriate means of strengthening in the composition of the medical service began to be clearly felt. The cavalry sanitary companies included in the medical service forces became such a means, greatly facilitating the operational evacuation.
Hospitals
Military doctors during the Great Patriotic War, tens of thousands worked in hospitals. For example, in the period 1941-1942. only in the armies of the Western Front there were 50 field mobile hospitals and 10 evacuation centers with a total capacity of 15,000 regular beds. The hospital base of the Western Front was deployed in two echelons in two evacuation directions. The total capacity of the hospital base reached 42,000 beds. At the same time, mainly field medical institutions were deployed in the first echelon, and almost exclusively in its second echelon.evacuation hospitals.
The feat of doctors during the Great Patriotic War was their selfless daily work. The main efforts of the medical service were aimed at evacuating the wounded and sick from those areas that were under the threat of capture by the enemy as soon as possible, providing medical assistance. A significant number of lightly wounded, as well as moderately wounded, continued to remain in the ranks. Significant sanitary losses suffered from the very beginning of the counteroffensive by the troops of the Kalinin and Western fronts led to the arrival of at least 150-200 wounded per day, and on days of intense fighting - up to 350-400.
Pharmacy
Medics during the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) fought not only on the fronts. Serious problems, sometimes unbearable, were delivered by the logistics of pharmacies with vital medicines. The fulfillment of the tasks of medical supply was further complicated by the fact that an impressive detachment of pharmacists and doctors left for the active army. The number of pharmacists working in pharmacies fell by half between 1941 and 1942.
The systematic supply of pharmacy chains with products and medicines was seriously disrupted: most of the medical industry enterprises were destroyed or evacuated. With the beginning of the Second World War, military pharmacies were staffed mainly by pharmacists called up for mobilization from the reserve. Most of them had a secondary pharmaceutical education and had never served in the army. A significant part of the workerswere women who completed a shortened period of study in pharmaceutical schools. A number of positions in pharmacies were occupied by paramedics.
Special difficulties were experienced by the chiefs of military pharmacies, in one person representing all regular positions. In addition to professional duties, pharmacists also had household chores. They themselves wrote documentation, received medicines, sterilized solutions, washed pharmacy dishes. Moreover, military requirements for the preparation and use of medicines had to be mastered along the way. The contribution of doctors during the Great Patriotic War was important not only on the front line, but also in the pharmacy network.
Example of Service
The history of the Second World War is rich in facts about how the role of one person influenced the fate of thousands. The main burden in saving lives and maintaining the ability to work of wounded soldiers was taken on by medical surgeons during the Great Patriotic War. Photos of distinguished specialists can be seen in print media, museums, and on the Internet. An illustrative example is the outstanding surgeon and organizer Vasily Vasilyevich Uspensky.
After the occupation of his native Kalinin (now Tver), a talented doctor headed the Kashinsky district hospital. At the same time, he was a surgeon of this medical institution, a consultant for evacuation hospitals deployed in the city of Kashin, neighboring settlements and the regional hospital evacuated to this city. It was he who operated on the legendary pilot-hero A. P. Maresyev. At the Kashin hospital, Vasily Vasilyevich organized a stationblood transfusion and district scientific society of physicians.
In 1943, V. V. Uspensky returned to Kalinin, where he organized a special hospital through which more than 3,000 children were delivered by planes from the enemy rear. This children's hospital was known even outside the country. In particular, Mrs. Clementine Churchill, the wife of the British Prime Minister, spoke enthusiastically about Ouspensky's service.
Provision of eye care
Wounds and eye injuries were common on the battlefields. Among the wounded soldiers who were being treated, the largest number were patients with shrapnel and bullet wounds of varying severity, requiring surgical intervention. Only in the hospitals of Saratov during the war, doctors from specialized ophthalmological departments and clinics for eye diseases helped restore the sight of 1858 wounded and 479 patients.
A significant contribution to the development of methods for providing medical care on the battlefield for eye injuries, as well as the diagnosis and treatment of eye injuries at the hospital stage, was made by the staff of the Department and Clinic of Eye Diseases, headed by Professor I. A. Belyaev. During the Great Patriotic War, Saratov doctors significantly improved the diagnosis and treatment of inflammatory eye diseases, and new technologies were introduced into the daily practice of ophthalmologists.
How the drug shortage problem was solved
The heroism of doctors during the Great Patriotic War was also manifested inrear. There was an acute shortage of medical supplies in the country, so the task was to revive the pharmaceutical industry, which was mostly destroyed at the beginning of the war. Within a short period of time, the supply of medicines was established.
Contributed to this:
- Relocation of a significant number of chemical and pharmaceutical industry enterprises to Central Asia. This led to the creation of the eastern chemical-pharmaceutical industry group, which took on the main burden of drug provision.
- Help from countries of the anti-fascist bloc. Cooperation made it possible to mount the most powerful plants for the production of streptocide, sulfidine and sulfazol, ethyl chloride and pharmacopoeial sodium.
- Reorientation of non-core industrial enterprises. The textile industry factories, which began to produce medical gauze, contributed to the way out of the shortage of dressings. Also, many enterprises of the chemical industry began to supply he alth authorities with ampoules: adrenaline, caffeine, glucose, morphine, pantopon and others.
- Replacing scarce pharmaceuticals with medicinal plants. In the spring of 1942 alone, about 50 tons of thirty-six species of medicinal plants were collected. Scientists have recreated the method of replacing medical cotton wool with sphagnum peat moss and obtained fir immersion oil instead of the traditional and scarce cedar oil.
Development of new drugs
Medicine women during the Great Patriotic War made an outstanding contribution todevelopment of new highly effective medicines. A significant breakthrough was the receipt by a group of Soviet scientists led by Professor Z. V. Ermolyeva of the first samples of penicillin. Yermolyeva's research group studied the therapeutic effect of the new drug "Penicillin-crustosin VIEM" for wounds and wound complications in medical battalions close to the battlefields, in home front clinics.
The Central Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, headed by Professor M. K. Krontovskaya, has mastered the method of producing typhoid vaccine. The People's Commissariat of He alth of the USSR recognized this remedy as effective in the fight against typhus, which was rampant at that time, and decided to use the new serum on a mass scale.
A scientific discovery of world significance was the development by an employee of the Leningrad Institute of Blood Transfusion, Professor LG Bogomolova, a method of freeze-drying of plasma. She was able, without knowing the blood type of the wounded, to transfuse large doses of a drug called "dry plasma" from a donor. With this method of transfusion, donated blood turns into a powder that is stored for a long time and is well transported.
Feat of nurses
During World War II, the need for nurses sharply escalated. In accordance with this, the He alth Tax Commission has taken up the accelerated training of paramedical personnel. Until 1945, the Committee of the Red Cross trained more than 500,000 sanitary troopers, 300,000 nurses, and more than 170,000 doctors. Looking death in the face, they bravelycarried the wounded from the scene of hostilities and provided them with assistance.
You can talk about heroic deeds, looking at the fate of the nurse of the battalion of marines Ekaterina Demina. A pupil of an orphanage, she served on the Krasnaya Moskva medical ship, which ferried the wounded from Stalingrad to Krasnovodsk. She quickly got tired of life in the rear, Catherine decided to become a nurse in the 369th separate battalion of the Marine Corps. At first, the paratroopers coolly accepted the girl, but she won respect. For all the time, Catherine saved the lives of more than 100 wounded, destroyed about 50 Nazis, and she herself received 3 wounds. E. I. Demina was awarded with many awards.
In the Second World War, the Red Cross successfully coped with the accelerated study of nurses and orderlies, and self-sacrifice, kindness and love for the Fatherland helped medical workers ensure the wounded recover and return to the front. Thus, everything possible was done for the Victory.
Afterword
Soviet doctors during the Great Patriotic War worked wonders, putting wounded soldiers on their feet. According to statistics, more than 70% of those admitted for treatment returned to service from our hospitals. For example: German doctors managed to return only about 40% of the wounded to the army.
